Thank you for stopping by! This is my first blog and first blog post. I have been fighting it for quite awhile but today, completely unplanned, here I am. My name is Charlene and I live in Southern Ontario, Canada.  My blog is called “Crystaldolphins’ Blog” because I LOVE dolphins! I have loved them for as long as I can remember and have a great deal of dolphin collectibles, t-shirts, pictures, etc. The ‘crystaldolphins’ comes from an amazing picture that I came across quite a number of years ago. I saw the picture and then discovered the link to the artist’s website. His name is Bruce Harman and his website is here. I own several of his prints and his work is as amazing in real life as it is in the pictures. In 2005, I went on the trip of a lifetime to swim with dolphins in the wild, on Bimini Island, Bahamas through Wildquest. The experience is almost beyond words.

Hopefully you’re not disappointed, but I do need to let you know my blog is not about dolphins! I have been a crafter for many years and my current addiction is card-making with rubber stamps and digi images. What I hope you’ll find here is some inspiration for your own card-making. I wanted to be able to promote other artists and sites and images freely, without breaking any rules in the on-line groups I belong to. I am also going to be offering some freebie digi sentiments and I wanted to have the freedom to do that and to sell them, which was the deciding factor in starting this blog. I also wanted to be able to post cards with, as Squigglefly would call them, ‘After Dark’ images! They’re going to be flagged ‘Pushing the Envelope’ on my site!

Some of the on-line card-making communities I belong to, include:  Splitcoast Stampers, Crafter’s Digital Art Centre (CDAC), The Outlawz and Paper Craft Planet. These links are to the main sign-on pages if you’re interested in checking them out. I participate in a lot of challenges on these sites and have been incredibly inspired by the work of a lot of talented people and have met some amazing crafters.

Through a post on Splitcoast, someone listed the source of one of the stamps they had used in a card and it was www.Squigglefly.com. It was a Shy Bear image (artist Lynne Stansbery) and from the second I saw that image, I was hooked (I now own so many I don’t even remember the very first one!) That first purchase led to numerous other purchases, then to their blog and the challenges on the blog to win free images. Participating in the challenges opened the door to an invitation to join the design team this past January 2012 and I have LOVED every second of it. We have 2 fantastic design teams, each person adding their talent, their generosity, their support and sense of humour. We are led by our fearless leader, Holly Young, who has an amazingly witty sense of humour and awesome enthusiasm that keeps us loving what we are doing! I have listed the design team members in the sidebar – please check out their amazing blogs!

Thanks again for stopping by.